HARP – Holographic Archive of Research Projects

In collaboration with Zhen Bai (Assistant Professor, University of Rochester) and John Choi (CEO, Choitek)

Holographic Archive of Research Projects @ Carnegie Mellon University (HARP@CMU) is a digital library of several hundred past research projects from all schools and disciplines, guided by a socially-aware humanoid virtual agent, displayed on a large custom 360 holographic display, where students, faculty, and guests can explore the rich history of interdisciplinary academic research conducted at the university. Leveraging state-of-the-art social AI technologies that the ArticuLab, Language Technologies Institute, and Human-Computer Interaction Institute has explored, and holographic augmented reality techniques that a group of students of Computer Science and Arts (Computer Science and Arts) and Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) prototyped, we will newly develop the agent-mediated library platform permanently installed in an accessible, popular and highly visible location on campus.

There are many cool public robotics and tech exhibits across campus like the Scrabble Robot in Gates, the body tracking information display in the University Center, and the Roboceptionist in Newell Simon Hall. We want to take this a step further by introducing novel open-source holographic display technologies to showcase a wide range of projects from various departments at CMU in a popular and accessible exhibit. Currently, the only collection of the coolest research projects at CMU is housed in the official CMU website, with other projects archived within the independent repositories of their respective departments. In the SARA project, we have built an original knowledge base of the CMU research resources, including faculty information, academic course information and research lab information, that can be retrieved through natural dialogues. We will extend this dialogue-based information retrieval framework to the digital library application.

In addition, there are no cool holograms on campus. CMU could make use of one to further showcase how awesome it is in the pushing the boundaries of technology while intersecting it with other disciplines in meaning ways.

The immediate outcome would be that CMU gets an interactive holographic display to showcase its multi-disciplinary research in a publicly accessible format that all guests, students, and faculty can enjoy. New students, faculty, and visiting guests get to learn about CMU’s rich culture, maps, projects, traditions, departments and history via an interactive holographic display. And finally, dozens of obscure but amazing research projects get local, on-campus exposure and showcasing their work among their peers via an attractive, high-tech augmented reality holographic display platform, further connecting the campus community.